24 October 2009

All stop

All stopWe had a few hot days this week so had the entire farm powered off during the day. As a result not too much progress.

Windows 7Seeing as it was finally released I bought an upgrade to put on my laptop. It had Vista which never worked properly. Its now running Windows 7. I have have a couple of issues since then:

Wireless LAN keeps dropping out

The fingerprint s/w (Verisoft Access Manager) isn't compatible and had to be un-installed

Apart from that it seems to be working fine. Its also faster than Vista.

Future upgradesSee previous posts about these. I spoke to the shop regarding the Windows 7 and memory upgrades. They are getting pricing for me. I was thinking of going to 6Gb per machine but with the i9 coming in Q2/2010 it might be worthwhile going up to 9Gb or even 12Gb.

BOINC versionsWe are up to 6.10.16 this week. It addresses issues for users that use remote access to their machines and BOINC (used to) kill their GPU tasks. As I don't use remote access software I never had this problem anyway.

ATI version of AstropulseI've been trying to test this new hybrid application. As CAL/Brook+ doesn't have any FFT functions they have to be done on the cpu and the other bits can be done on the gpu. Unfortunately it won't work with the Catalyst 8.12 drivers. These older drivers are required for the Milkyway optimised ATI gpu app. The 9.x series Catalyst drivers crash.